


Before I Say Something (I Might Regret)

by prouvairablehulk



Category: King Falls AM (Podcast), The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Archivist Jack, Multi, The Void was the Magnus Archives Univers, crossover time
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-11
Packaged: 2020-01-11 20:04:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18431135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prouvairablehulk/pseuds/prouvairablehulk
Summary: Jack Wright comes back from the Void and starts asking questions. The right questions. Questions people can't help but answer honestly. And where the fuck are all these tape recorders coming from?





	Before I Say Something (I Might Regret)

When they get Jack back, Sammy thinks, for a moment - for a single glorious stretch of about twelve hours in which he is riding high on adrenaline and the joy of having Jack in his arms, the weight of him proving his existence in the physical plane - that everything might be alright. 

It takes until Jack wakes them both up by screaming bloody murder as a result of whatever nightmare he’d had for Sammy to realize that won’t be the case. Jack sits upright in bed, chest heaving, eyes wet with tears, hands twisting in the blankets, and unable to look at Sammy. 

Jack Wright dragged himself back from the Void with shaking hands and sheer determination. He didn’t do it alone, and he didn’t do it without sacrifice. 

Voice shaking, he speaks, for the first time since they found him tumbling out of Perdition Woods. 

“Nothing is going to be okay.” he says. 

“That’s not true.” Sammy says, taking one of those clenched hands between both of his. 

“It is true.” says Jack Wright, and then he turns his head, just slightly. “Look.”

There’s a tape recorder sitting on Jack’s side table. The light is on. The wheels are turning, spinning the tape around and around and around. 

“Hello, Watcher.” says Jack, to the tape recorder. 

And then, tired, worn, with a different tone of voice, one Sammy has never heard him use before. 

“Turn off the fucking tape recorder, Watcher.” 

The click is sharp despite the age of the tape recorder, and Jack breathes out. 

“There’s a lot I need to tell you.” he says. 

“It will keep until the morning.” says Sammy. 

That might not be true, but Sammy needs it to be. He gathers Jack in his arms, and tries to sleep. 

He isn’t sure if he dreams the click of the tape recorder turning back on. 

***

Jack comes to work with Sammy the next morning, and sits in the corner of the studio, twisting his fingers in the hem of the t-shirt he’s wearing. He looks tired - so tired, bags deep purple under his eyes. There’s blood under his nails, still, visible when he wraps his hands around the mug of coffee Ben poured him from the french press the two of them have taken to keeping in the station’s breakroom. 

“We have Jack with us today.” Ben’s saying, but Sammy’s barely listening, focused on Jack’s tired, lined, face, on Jack’s slightly trembling hands, on the gray that’s laced through his hair, so very prematurely. 

“Jack, Sammy said it was important we had you on, that you said you had something to tell us both?”

Jack smiles, but there’s no humor in it. 

“We’re in trouble.” he says. “So much trouble.” 

“What sort of trouble?” asks Ben, fingers twitching on the board. 

Jack shakes his head, takes a sip of his coffee, and draws something out of the pocket of the coat he’d been wearing when he came home to Sammy. It’s a manila file, with a number handwritten, slightly shakily, on the tab. 

“For those of you at home, Jack’s just given me a file - it’s labelled with a number and the heading is -” 

Ben’s voice trails off. 

“What the fuck?” he says, after a beat.

Jack smiles that same, horrific, humorless smile. It’s the smile of someone who knows too much to find anything funny anymore. 

“Read it, Ben.” he says. 

“It says -” Ben starts, looking unnerved.

“It says ‘statement of Gertrude Robinson, regarding the disappearance of James Wright, her predecessor as Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute’.”

Jack’s still smiling, eerie and untouched by - by whatever it is that Ben’s reading. 

“You should be quick about that.” he says. “I don’t know how long we have before Elias notices that it’s missing.”

“Who’s Elias?” asks Sammy, struggling to parse all the information that has been dumped on him. 

“My boss. Former boss, I suppose.” says Jack. He turns, slightly, angles himself towards Ben. His tone of voice changes, takes on the slight echo Sammy had heard him use last night. “What does the file say, Ben?”

“It says that a man named James Wright spent five years as the head archivist of a paranormal research body called the Magnus Institute, and then disappeared suddenly, without warning.” 

Sammy’s just looking at Jack, hopelessly, Jack who is curled into a ball in the armchair, hands wrapped tight around the mug in his hands. His Jack, who kept himself alive for five years by - by what Sammy isn’t sure he wants to know. 

“This says he just vanished, one day. They had no idea what happened to him, but that there was a book on his desk. A book about doors.” 

Jack’s smile is tight, now. There’s pain in it. He puts down his mug. Sammy hasn’t looked away since Ben started talking, eyes fixed on Jack’s face, which is why Ben’s next words come as something of a surprise. 

“I wasn’t going to say that - how did you make me say that?” 

Sammy jerks around, and Ben’s horrified eyes are almost the worst thing he’s ever seen, second only to the open doors of Jack’s running, empty, car. 

“How did you -” Ben starts, only for Jack to stop him. 

“I’m the Archivist.” says Jack. 

Sammy looks between them, horribly confused. 

“Is this to do with the tape recorder, from last night?” he asks Jack. 

“Yes. That’s from the Watcher. Which is why we’re in trouble. The Void, it shouldn’t be here, They shouldn’t be here.”

Ben starts to look - less scared, and more interested. Jack’s eyes dart over to the pile of notebooks stacked on Ben’s side of the desk, and he smiles, just a little. 

“Who are they?” Ben asks. “Who are you worried about?”

“The Fears.” Jack tells him. “You’ll learn. You’ll definitely learn. The Watcher likes you.” 

Sammy jolts upright, and watches Jack move slowly, slowly, slowly, until he takes them off the air with a gentle movement of his fingers. Ben’s eyes widen. 

“Let me tell you about it over breakfast.” he says. Ben nods, like he can’t help himself, gathering up the notebooks as he stands. 

Jack takes Sammy’s hand as they get up, lacing their fingers together, and pulls him out the door. Sammy wonders if he really knows Jack any more, but follows him anyway - Sammy’s changed too, after all, and this is Jack, his Jack, the Jack who has been the light in his life for such a long time. 

Sammy follows, fingers tightening convulsively around Jack’s, and hopes that he will understand soon. 

***

There’s a girl sitting on the hood of Sammy’s car, when they leave the station, face tilted towards the sun, light glinting off the silver eye charm that hangs off the ring in the cartilage of her ear. There’s black ink visible behind her ear, black ink on her knuckles, on her wrists, on the exposed blades of her shoulders, tiny eyes that - Sammy would swear that they would blink, on occasion. 

“Hello, Archivist.” 

Jack turned around and started to walk back into the station. The girl with the eye tattoos, to one sitting on Sammy’s car, who apparently knows his fiance, tilts her head back and laughs. 

“Nope!” says Jack, loudly, theatrically. “Nope, you’re not here, this isn’t real, nope, nope, nope.” 

“But I am here.” says the girl. She’s got an accent that’s similar to Jack’s Maori-voweled English, if you stuck it in a blender with someone educated at Oxford. 

“If you’re here, you read a Book.” Jack says, and Sammy can hear the capitalization. 

“Leave me alone, Dad. You disappeared. I came looking for you.”

“By reading a Book.” hisses Jack. 

“Actually, I just made a bit of a deal with -” she starts. 

Jack finally turns around, eyes wide and slightly horrified. 

“THAT IS NOT BETTER!”

She raises her hands in a placating type of gesture. It shows that there are eye tattoos on the second and third knuckles of her fingers, blinking in waves of color.

“It’s cool, we came to a mutually beneficial arrangement that does not directly harm you and me. We’re gonna be fine.” 

Jack sighs, and drops his head into his hands. His next words are muffled. 

“Sammy, this is Ngaire, one of my assistants. Ngaire, this is -”

Ngaire cuts him off, veritably flinging herself off the hood of Sammy’s car. 

“Sammy! You’re Sammy. It’s very nice to finally meet you in person, Jack talks about you all the time.”

She offers Sammy a blinking hand to shake. Sammy does so, slightly perturbed. 

Jack’s starting to smile, very slightly. 

“What did you promise?” he asks Ngaire. She crosses past Sammy to tuck her hand into the crook of Jack’s arm.

“I told Him about the tunnels.” she says, grinning. 

“Elias will murder you for that one.”

“Sucks to be Elias, then, because you know He won’t help, and the book isn’t going to like him.” 

Jack’s smiling even wider now. Ngaire reaches her free hand into the leather satchel she’s wearing and fishes something out, passing it toward Jack. The metal of the tape recorder glints in the rising sun. 

“I thought you might like yours back.” she says. “I know how fond you got of it.” 

Jack smooths his fingers over the worn buttons on the top of the casing. He takes it out of Ngaire’s hand, and all the eyes on her knuckles have vibrant green irises and locked open eyelids as soon as their fingers touch. 

“We’re going for breakfast.” Jack tells her. “Come with, won’t you?”

“Course!” chirps Ngaire, and loops her arm through Sammy’s, too, pulling them both towards the door. 

She sits in the passenger seat on their way to Rose’s, leaving the backseat free for Sammy to half-curl against Jack’s side while Jack plays with his hair. She and Ben seem to get on like a house on fire, which Sammy is beginning to think spells disaster. They’re arguing about Mothman when they walk into Rose’s, Sammy’s fingers still twisted into Jack’s, and they stay arguing until they’ve sat down, ordered, and received their food. 

It’s then that Jack draws out the tape recorder Ngaire gave him, and puts it on the table. He presses down on the record button, and turns to Sammy and Ben, Ngaire a solid presence at his shoulder. 

“We’re going to talk, and I’m going to tell you everything, but there’s something we need to do first.” he says. 

“Alright.” says Sammy, because he’s going to do anything for Jack. 

“What is it you need us to do?” asks Ben, who just wants to know more. 

“Statement of Ben Arnold and Sammy Stevens, regarding the influence of the Void on the town of King Falls.” Jack says, for the tape recorder. “Statement is of particular importance because the Void should not exist, and one of the people it is affecting is my fucking husband, Watcher, so you’d better start telling me things that will help. Recorded directly from subjects, by Jack Wright.” 

Jack pauses, and the grin that flashes across his face is the physical incarnation of malice, that same, too-knowing, nearly humorless, smile. Sammy really ought to admit, finally, that it’s attractive. It shouldn’t be hot. It really shouldn’t. But it is. Sammy’s fiance looks like he’s about to commit a murder and Sammy wants to jump him in a vinyl-lined diner booth in front of half the town. 

“The Archivist.” says Jack, to finish his narration.

And then he looks at Sammy, and he fucking winks. 

Like he knows.


End file.
